Single Review: Fly You Home

Ariana Tikao’s Fly You Home is a beautiful track devoted to “indigenous solidarity” across the nation. Produced by Brooke Singer and Ben Lemi of French for Rabbits, the track is dreamy and gentle, offering a true sense of tranquility amongst the stress and sound of current times.

Fly You Home opens subtly and restrained, with soft, delicate keys, soothing bass and relaxed drums. Tikao’s smooth vocal welcomes in a lyrical search for community, particularly relating to the Covid-19 pandemic as the world finds itself “out of control”, and Tikao seeks for her friend and the song’s muse, Dovie Thomason. The chorus presents a striking image of a bird “lying prone”, awaiting its chance to fly home once more. Fragile backing vocals craft this sense of family strongly. Excitingly, the song mixes English and Te Reo, giving it a stunning flair and intense expressiveness which one language could not achieve alone.

Tikao’s friendship to Dovie shimmers with a stunning intensity on Fly You Home, a peaceful, ethereal ode to friends and whanau in difficult times. If Tikao is right and “we become the tales we’re told”, Fly You Home is a beautiful Waiata to find one’s identity within.